A blog post from Adfree Cities
June 19th is Clean Air Day, so we’re taking a look at the ways in which advertising promotes air pollution. If you walk around any town or city and look at the ads you see on screens and billboards, it’s quickly obvious that almost all ads are for polluting products.
Ads for flights and cars are easy examples, but even products like meat and dairy, tech and fast fashion have an air pollution footprint.
Every pound spent on advertising for a product is intended to do one thing: increase sales of that product. So if the advertised product creates air pollution, and the advert increases sales of that product, we can trace a line of causality from the ad to the pollution.
Air pollution kills 30,000 people every year in the UK, and costs the country £500 million per week from the effects of ill health. Clean air is a basic right and yet 99% of us are regularly exposed to high levels of air pollution. Cleaning up advertising won’t solve the problem alone, but is a necessary part of the solution.
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